Automated download of transactions (e.g., financial transactions) is a useful feature of online business management applications. One obstacle to using downloaded transactions is the variable format of their descriptions, which may vary widely across different transaction sources. Different transaction sources may use different representations of values such as entity names, locations, times, etc. In the case of financial transactions, due to this variability, even the same location of a single entity may be represented using a large number of different formats, depending on which payment method was used (e.g., debit card, Visa, MasterCard, etc.), which payment networks handled the transaction, and which financial institution recorded the transaction. Large dictionaries of commonly used transaction description keywords may be used to address the variable transaction format problem. However, the usefulness of such dictionaries tends to limited to a specific language (e.g., English).